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Variation and Linguistic Theory-Final A chapter in: Maguire, Warren & McMahon, April (eds.) Analysing variation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. NB: The endnotes added here do not appear in the published version (the passages included in the notes are sad casualties of the word limit). Also, this version rectifies problems introduced by copyeditors (e.g., in the presentation of tables and tableaux). It can be cited as: • Honeybone, P. (2011). Variation and linguistic theory. In: Maguire, Warren & McMahon, April (eds.) Analysing variation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 151- 177. Extended version, available at: http://www.englang.ed.ac.uk/people/patrick2.html. Variation and linguistic theory Patrick Honeybone University of Edinburgh, [email protected] 1. Introduction It may seem surprising, but linguistic variation is often seen as a ‘problem’ for linguistic theory. The models that formalist, theoretically-minded linguists work with typically assume that linguistic behaviour is categorical and idealise away from the variation that is found in speech. The justification for this, following Chomsky (1965), is that much of the variation found in utterances is due to non-linguistic factors, and thus idealisation is necessary in order to see the underlying patterns behind speakers’ linguistic performance. A number of strands of work in theoretical linguistics have, however, sought to take linguistic variation seriously, and they form the topic of this chapter, along with the argumentation that arises when linguistic theorists talk about (or refuse to talk about) linguistic variation. It’s no secret that languages like English are full of variation. If illustration is needed, let us consider a simple sentence like (1), which might describe a woman giving her coat her brother. (1) Betty took off her coat and gave him it. If we limit ourselves to syntactic and phonological variation (as I do throughout this chapter), we could imagine a number of ways in which speakers of English might utter (1), or something very close.1 As a speaker of English born and raised in the English East Midlands, I could easily utter (1), but I could also utter (2). (2) Betty took her coat off and gave him it. Is (2) the same sentence as (1)? It would be true under the same set of circumstances and it features the same set of words, so let’s assume that it is. This means that a speaker from the North-West of England, for example, would also be uttering the same sentence if they said (3), which is how they, among others, might prefer it (as Siewierska & Hollmann 2007 explain). (3) Betty took her coat off and gave it him. 1 The fact that (1), (2) and (3) are all possible in English plainly shows that syntactic variation exists, and variation at the phonological level is also unavoidable. That same speaker from England’s North-West might well pronounce Betty as [bEtI], her as [«] and off as [•f]. Some speakers from that area, however, particularly if they came from Lancashire, might pronounce her as [«¨]. Indeed, the same speaker might sometimes pronounce it as [«] and sometimes as [«¨]. A speaker from the North-West of the USA, on the other hand, would certainly have a rhotic pronunciation of her, like the Lancashire speaker, but would likely pronounce Betty as [bERi] and off as [Af]. Such examples can be multiplied manifold, as any speaker of English knows. Betty would likely be [bE?i] for a speaker of London English, and many speakers from other parts of the UK might now vary between [bEti] and [bE?i], with different types of populations favouring either the oral stop over the glottal or vice versa. Speakers from Liverpool, on the other hand, may realise the /t/ as a slit alveolar fricative, in a case of lenition, which we can represent as in [bETi], and speakers from Newcastle upon Tyne might pronounce the name as [bEt?i]. It is often said that linguistic variation occurs when one meaning can be attached to more than one form. This is clearly the case for Betty: it doesn’t change the meaning if a speaker says [bEti] one minute and [bE?i] the next, and it also seems right to say that ‘gave him it’ and ‘gave it him’ mean the same, but involve different linguistic forms. These are two cases of linguistic variables - single linguistic items (‘meanings’) which have multiple identifiable variants (‘forms’). The variable (t) has all the variants described above, including [t] and [?] and the variable (pronoun- object-order) has the two variants given here. In this piece, I focus on variation of this type, where one referent has more than one form, and where some sort of geographical, social or at least stylistic effect is associated with the different forms. I leave aside other ways in which language can vary (such as when a phoneme varies categorically in its allophones or a form varies diachronically over time). How can this abundant variation be a problem for theoretical linguistics? In part, this derives from deep-reaching disagreements about what we mean by ‘language’. There is an everyday meaning for that word, and it might seem that that it’s obvious what we mean when we talk about ‘English’. However, as we will see, neither of these notions are as straightforward as their everyday meanings might imply when we view them through the lens of linguistic theory. There are two fundamental types of variation that confront us when we consider the notion ‘a language like English’, and both of them were exemplified above. I investigate this point further in section 2. Sections 3 and 4 take these two types of variation in turn and discuss why they should matter to theoretical linguists, considering some of the methods that are used to analyse such cases of variation, and showing their relevance for linguistic theory. Section 5 concludes. We cannot all branches of linguistic theory, so I only consider some of the most popular. I use ‘linguistic theory’ here with its standard, restricted reference: I mean that approach which aims to provide formal, concise statements concerning the structural generalisations that can be made about language in general, or about individual languages. This ‘theoretical linguistics’ takes at least some impetus from the body of ideas associated with the generative linguistics of Chomsky. It can be contrasted with ‘variationist linguistics’, in the tradition of Labov (1966), which explicitly focuses on the ways in which speakers vary in their utterances, in terms of the number of variants that they produce for particular linguistic variables. This has shown that all languages are inherently variable (including cases of stable variation which can persist in a language for centuries) and that this involves orderly 2 heterogeneity - speakers of similar backgrounds tend to consistently use the same proportion of variants of a variable: variation is not haphazard. In what is to come, we will both see why much of theoretical linguistics does not really pay much heed to linguistic variation (seeing it as a problem which can reasonably be ignored, because the problem actually belongs to someone else - variationists), and consider some work which aims to integrate accounts of linguistic variation into formal linguistic theory (seeing variation as a problem to be solved). 2. Linguistic theory and the two types of variation that it needs to deal with Language varies in a number of ways, but there are arguably two types of variation which are fundamentally distinct from each other, and which could have different implications for linguistic theory. Some of the variation in (1), (2), (3) and the realisations of Betty, her and off, above, compares forms that are possible in different dialects of English, while other aspects of this variation refer to how a single speaker (of a single dialect) might realise the forms. The term ‘variation’ is thus ambiguous, and either (4) or (5) can be intended by it: (4) variation between speakers = inter-speaker variation (5) variation within a speaker = intra-speaker variation Inter-speaker variation was illustrated above by the comparison between those speakers who might prefer the order of ‘gave it him’ and those who might prefer ‘gave him it’, and by the comparison between those speakers who might tap the /t/ in Betty ([bERi]) and those who might glottal it ([bE?i]). Intra-speaker variation is involved in the cases where the same speaker might order the particle before the direct object in ‘took off her coat’ one moment, but might use the other order the next, and in the case where the same speaker might glottal the /t/ in Betty in one utterance, but might realise it as a plain [t] in the next. If our aim is to investigate ‘the linguistics of a language’ such as English (as it surely is in a volume such as this) we need to consider both types of variation as they both exist in the phenomenon that we call ‘English’. As we will see when we consider them individually, however - (4) in section 3, and (5) in section 4 - their implications and the responses of linguists who have considered them are very different. Theoretical linguistics is thus faced with two questions (two problems?): how should it deal with inter-speaker variation and how should it deal with intra-speaker variation? Theoretical linguists of different persuasions have argued that both or neither or only one of these two should be taken into account as they work to figure out the nature of speakers’ grammars. It is probably fair to say that most work in linguistic theory does not see inter- speaker variation as relevant to theory construction. This position depends on answers to two questions, given here in (6) and (7), which go to the heart of a fundamental issue: the nature of the proper object of linguistic study.
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